This study explored Mandarin-speaking mothers' referential choice in relation to informativeness. The data consisted of two Mandarin-speaking mothers' natural conversation with their children, collected when the children were between the ages of 2;2 and 3;1. The subject and object arguments of the mothers' utterances were coded for the categories…

Numerous studies conducted in both the psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic fields have established that the parents' socio-economic status (SES) influences several aspects of children's language production. Moreover, a number of psycholinguistic studies strongly suggest that these differences are due in part to differences in the nature and the…

Examines the innate faculties that underlie linguistic competence, especially syntactic competence, and proposes a theory of these faculties which accounts for the complexities of language and the evolution of human language. (AM)

In dealing with the differences between the school and non-school language of Black children, the author uses a contingency grammar," which considers all speakers of a language to have the identical linguistics competence but includes a level of systematic performance" to account for dialectal and other systematic differences. (FB)

Reviewing the language instinct debate, this article identifies generativist views with the baby's proverbial bathwater. Suggests that instead of analyzing language into form-based units, it should be treated as an aspect of social life deriving from a capacity to contextualize experience. (Author/VWL)

Schlesinger defends his theory that grammar is acquired not merely through linguistic input but by observing that utterances are paired with appropriate situations, thereby learning the agent/ action relationship. Stemmer argues that word order learned by children is semantically determined. (CK)

Reports on a study of the color terms used in Setswana. The study compared terms used by children with those of adults and those used by people from rural areas with those used by people from urban areas. Results show a move away from traditional Setswana color terms toward the use of borrowed English terms, particularly among the young and…